UK CMA Subsidy Control Referral Watch

Subsidy Advice Unit referrals and reports.

Source

gov.uk Search API, CMA case records (public, logged-out)

• https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_format=cma_case

Public, logged-out only — no API key, login, cookie or CAPTCHA.

The eight delta types

value	case family
merger-inquiry-open	a merger inquiry appears or opens
merger-outcome	a merger case gains an outcome or closes
consumer-enforcement	consumer-enforcement case movement
cartel-investigation	Competition Act, civil/criminal cartel and director-disqualification cases
digital-markets-status	Digital Markets Unit case movement
subsidy-referral	Subsidy Advice Unit referral movement
market-study	market study and market investigation movement
remedy-review	review of existing orders and undertakings

Leave delta_types empty for all eight. Every delta carries delta_kinds.

How this actor talks about investigations

An open Competition Act or cartel case is an investigation, not a finding. This actor is built so it cannot say otherwise:

• finding_status is read from an explicit map of every outcome value the CMA corpus contains. An unrecognised outcome reports no-finding-recorded-unmapped-outcome — it is never pattern-matched into a status.
• states_adverse_finding is true for exactly four published outcomes: Chapter I infringement, Chapter II infringement, a disqualification order granted, and a consumer-law court order.
• No party names are extracted from investigation or enforcement cases. Merger titles are structured, so merger parties are listed; a cartel case carries its title verbatim and an empty parties list.
• A criminal-cartel verdict is reported as a verdict. The source does not say which way it went, so neither does this actor.
• Commitments, undertakings, no-grounds-for-action and administrative-priorities closures all report explicitly as not findings.
• Investigation cases without a published adverse finding carry a language_note saying so.

Pricing

Event	Price (FREE tier)
Actor start (apify-actor-start)	$0.02 one-time
Source check (source-check)	$0.10
Per delta (cma-case-delta)	$0.30

source-check ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.10 / $0.09 / $0.08 / $0.067. Charged once per run after the source enumeration terminates — seed and genuine-zero runs included. Not charged when the source refused the read.

The per-delta value event (cma-case-delta) is the primary event and is priced at $0.30 per delta at the FREE tier. Ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.30 / $0.27 / $0.24 / $0.201 (FREE / BRONZE / SILVER / GOLD-PLATINUM-DIAMOND). source-check still charges; it is no longer the headline event. Billed deltas are capped at 500 per run and any overflow is reported as a withholding rather than charged.

Snapshot mode is a PREVIEW

watch_mode: false returns at most 25 records, hard-capped in code.

Watch semantics

First watch run seeds and emits zero deltas. Billed deltas capped at 500 per run. A truncated read suppresses REMOVED rather than reporting a case as withdrawn.

Terminal states

NORMAL · SUCCEEDED-0: GENUINE_EMPTY · SUCCEEDED-0 (no change) · PARTIAL · BLOCKED.

Run it WEEKLY, not daily

Schedule this Actor once a week. That is about your bill, not your coverage — a weekly run reads the same corpus and misses nothing.

The CMA docket is slow. Walking all 2,570 cases on 2026-07-27, every one of the six CMA watches measured under one delta per week, and most well under. A daily schedule pays seven source-check events a week for a source that moves two or three times a week across the whole docket — the check would be 70–80% of your bill and buy no extra signal.

This is a low-frequency, high-consequence feed. A merger prohibition or a Chapter I infringement finding moves share prices; it just does not happen on a Tuesday because you checked. Override the cadence if you have a reason to.

One delta type per Actor

This Actor watches subsidy-referral and nothing else. The other delta types in this family are separate Actors, each with its own price and its own baseline — so you pay for the feed you want and no other.